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Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Senator, Is Dead at 82

Senator Arlen Specter, center, questioning Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in April 2007 during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about the firing of eight United States attorneys.Credit
Susan Etheridge for the New York Times

WASHINGTON — Arlen Specter, the irascible senator from Pennsylvania who was at the center of many of the Senate’s most divisive legal battles — from the Supreme Court nominations of Robert H. Bork and Clarence Thomas to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton — only to lose his seat in 2010 after quitting the Republican Party to become a Democrat, died Sunday morning at his home in Philadelphia. He was 82.

The cause was complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his son Shanin said. Mr. Specter had previously fought Hodgkin’s disease and survived a brain tumor and heart bypass surgery.

Hard-edged and tenacious yet ever the centrist, Mr. Specter was a part of American public life for more than four decades. As an ambitious young lawyer for the Warren Commission, he took credit for originating the theory that a single bullet, fired by a lone gunman, struck both President John F. Kennedy and Gov. John B. Connally of Texas. Seconds later, Kennedy was struck by a fatal shot to the head from the same gunman, the commission found.

In the Senate, where he was long regarded as its sharpest legal mind, he led the Judiciary Committee through a tumultuous period that included two Supreme Court confirmations, even while battling Hodgkin’s disease in 2005 and losing his hair to chemotherapy.

Yet he may be remembered best for his quixotic party switch in 2009 and the subsequent campaign that cost him the Senate seat he had held for almost 30 years. After 44 years as a Republican, Mr. Specter, who began his career as a Democrat, changed sides because he feared a challenge from the right. He wound up losing in a Democratic primary; the seat stayed in Republican hands.

“Arlen Specter was always a fighter,” President Obama said in a statement issued Sunday, calling Mr. Specter “fiercely independent” and citing his “toughness and determination” in dealing with his personal health struggles.

One of the few remaining Republican moderates on Capitol Hill at a time when the party had turned sharply to the right, Mr. Specter confounded fellow Republicans at every turn. He unabashedly supported Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal, and championed biomedical and embryonic stem cell research long before he received his cancer diagnosis.

When he made a bid for the White House in 1995, he denounced the Christian right as an extremist “fringe” — an unorthodox tactic for a candidate trying to win votes in a Republican primary. The campaign was short-lived; Mr. Specter ended it when he ran out of cash. Years later, he said wryly of the other candidates, “I was the only one of nine people in New Hampshire who wanted to keep the Department of Education.”

Photo

Mr. Specter, with a diagram critical of the health care plans of President Bill Clinton, in a speech in New Hampshire in 1995.Credit
John Mottern/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images

He enjoyed a good martini and a fast game of squash, and he was famous for parsing his words to wiggle out of tight spots. During Mr. Clinton’s impeachment on charges of perjury and obstruction, Mr. Specter, objecting to what he called a “sham trial” without witnesses, signaled that he would vote to acquit.

He relished the decades he spent on the Judiciary Committee. He enraged conservatives in 1987 by helping to derail Judge Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court and then delighted them four years later by backing Justice Thomas. The Thomas confirmation nearly cost Mr. Specter his Senate seat; even now, millions of American women remain furious with him for his aggressive questioning of Anita F. Hill, a law professor who had accused Justice Thomas of sexual harassment when they worked together at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

If he had any regrets, Mr. Specter rarely admitted them.

“I’ve gone back and looked at every frame of the videos on Professor Hill, and I did not ask her one unprofessional question,” he said in a 2004 interview with The New York Times. Of the Bork and Thomas confirmations, he said, “I may be wrong, but I’m satisfied with what I did in both those cases.”

Brash confidence and outsize ego were characteristic of Mr. Specter, a man so feared by his own aides and so brusque with colleagues that he earned the nickname Snarlin’ Arlen on Capitol Hill. In 1992, when Mr. Specter’s Senate seat was in danger after the Thomas hearings, Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement, campaigned for him. His rationale was expressed in a statement he made to fellow conservatives, as quoted by the conservative magazine National Review.

“Arlen Specter is a jerk,” he was said to have remarked, “but he’s our jerk.”

Those close to Mr. Specter say there was a softer side to him, but no one denied that as a lawmaker he was all business, with little patience for the false pleasantries of politics.

G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., who followed Mr. Specter’s career, once described how the senator would conduct constituent meetings: “He’ll say, ‘I’m delighted to be here,’ and give his standard 10- or 15-minute opening. Then he’ll say, ‘I’ll take questions now; whoever has a question, put up their hands.’ He will count the hands — 1, 2, 3, 4, to 20. And when 20 is over, he’s out of there.”

Arlen Specter was born on Feb. 12, 1930, in Wichita, Kan., the fourth and youngest child of Harry and Lillian Specter. Harry Specter, a Jewish émigré from the Ukraine, then part of Russia, moved his family back and forth between the East Coast and the Midwest seeking work before settling in Kansas as a peddler. By the time Arlen was 5, he too was peddling, selling cantaloupes door to door by his father’s side.

When scrap metal became salable during World War II, the Specters moved to the small Kansas town of Russell, coincidentally the hometown of another person who would become a prominent Republican senator, Bob Dole. There, the elder Specter opened a junkyard; when tornadoes blew through, he sent his son into the oil fields with a torch to cut up the toppled derricks.

Carl Feldbaum, a friend and a former chief of staff to the senator, traced Mr. Specter’s gruffness to those days.

“There’s a hard-bitten quality that came out of being an immigrant,” Mr. Feldbaum said, “of being the only Jewish family in a small Midwestern town and living through the Depression, war era.”

The Specters later moved to Philadelphia — “so my sister could meet and marry a nice Jewish boy,” Mr. Specter explained — where he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1951, served in the Air Force and then earned a law degree from Yale in 1956. By 1959, he was an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, prosecuting union racketeers and attracting the attention of some leaders in Washington.

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His parents were Democrats, and so was he, until he tried to run for Philadelphia district attorney in 1965. As Mr. Specter recalled, the local Democratic chairman told him that the party did not want a “young Tom Dewey as D.A.,” a reference to the former New York governor and racket-buster Thomas E. Dewey, a Republican. So Mr. Specter ran on the Republican ticket as a Democrat. He switched his party registration after he won.

Thus began what Mr. Specter liked to call “the continuing effort I have made to pull the Republican Party to the center.”

He won his first election to the Senate in 1980 and, as he recounted in his 2000 autobiography, “Passion for Truth,” immediately began courting Senator Strom Thurmond, the deeply conservative South Carolina Republican who was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, seeking a seat on the panel.

In the Senate, Mr. Specter, putting his prosecutor’s skills to use, was a relentless interrogator in judicial confirmations. Tom Korologos, a former ambassador and a lobbyist who was often called upon by Republican presidents to shepherd their nominees through the Senate, said that no matter how much information a nominee provided, Mr. Specter wanted more — “the Ph.D. treatment,” in Mr. Korologos’s words.

Never was that more true than during the Bork hearings.

“Bork, I have said many times, was the Einstein of the law,” Mr. Korologos said, “and Specter was the Einstein of the Senate, and they used to talk past each other like two trains. Specter would ask these long, convoluted questions, and Bork would give these long, convoluted answers.”

The Senate rejected the nomination, and conservatives never forgave Mr. Specter. Judge Bork, in an interview with The Times in 2004, called him “generally a bit shifty.” Likewise, women’s groups, who had considered Mr. Specter an ally, never forgave him for accusing Ms. Hill of perjury. Ultimately, Mr. Specter expressed contrition, saying he had come to understand why Ms. Hill’s complaint of sexual harassment had “touched a raw nerve among so many women.”

But the remark, coming in 1992 when Mr. Specter was facing a tough re-election campaign, rang hollow with his critics and even some admirers, who said it was another example of how he did whatever it took to save his political career.

“He would always seem to walk up to the edge, the abyss politically, and find a way to extricate himself from the problem,” Professor Madonna said. “He could pull the rabbits out of more hats.”

But the rabbit-pulling came to an abrupt end in 2010 for Mr. Specter, the longest-serving senator in Pennsylvania history. The year before, as the Tea Party gained strength, Mr. Specter candidly declared his Republican-to-Democrat conversion a matter of political survival.

“I am not prepared to have my 29-year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate — not prepared to have that record decided by that jury,” he said.

Republicans were knocked off stride; many had no warning from Mr. Specter. At first, it seemed that he might have an easy ride to the Democratic nomination. But even with the endorsement of Mr. Obama, he failed to attract support from Democrats. Many were annoyed by the alliance he had forged years earlier with another Pennsylvania senator, the conservative Republican Rick Santorum.

Mr. Specter lost his primary race with just 46 percent of the vote — an outcome that left him looking drained and shocked. In a memoir published last year, “Life Among the Cannibals,” he denounced the partisanship that has enveloped Washington.

“The fringes have displaced tolerance with purity tests,” he wrote.

Besides his son Shanin, Mr. Specter is survived by his wife of 59 years, Joan; a sister, Shirley Kety; another son, Stephen; and four grandchildren.

Though Mr. Specter was known mostly for his contributions to domestic policy — along with Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, he successfully fought to double the budget of the National Institutes of Health for medical research during the Clinton years — he dipped into foreign policy as well. Mr. Feldbaum, Mr. Specter’s former chief of staff, recalled a trip they made to Baghdad in 1990 to meet Saddam Hussein.

Mr. Specter took a camera along — “out of caution, he wanted us to have our own pictures,” Mr. Feldbaum said — but palace guards wrested it out of Mr. Feldbaum’s hands. When Mr. Hussein arrived, the senator demanded his camera back.

“It wasn’t the camera; it was the principle,” Mr. Feldbaum said. “It wasn’t only that he was a United States senator and a representative of the United States of America. He was Arlen Specter.”

Correction: October 15, 2012

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the bullet that killed President John F. Kennedy. It was not the one that, according to the single-bullet theory propounded by Mr. Specter, wounded both Kennedy and Gov. John B. Connally of Texas. The fatal wound came from another bullet.

A version of this article appears in print on October 15, 2012, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Senator, Is Dead at 82. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe